Some time ago I wrote, that Lightroom is a very nice program, but with some serious flaws that made me decide not to use. So now I’ve changed my mind, and decided to make Lightroom the hub of my digital workflow. How come?

Because Lightroom offers me 85% of what I need in one integrated package. First of all it’s a very capable photo-database with nice features for sorting, tagging, etc. Secondly it is an excellent RAW-converter. Furthermore it offers basic photo-editing, based on the idea of non-destructive editing. Finally it’s all wrapped up in a rather nice and functional user interface.

Apparently the developers at Adobe have done some serious case studies of the workflow of pro-photographers. The result is a program which – unlike Photoshop – is very “photocentric”.

How about the flaws then? Well of course they are still there. I hope that Adobe will include both the “save to web” as well as the “proof colors” that we know from Photoshop in the next version of Lightroom. And from some of the forums on the net, it seems like I’m not the only one with that hope…

Until this hope is fulfilled, there are basically two options when it comes to generate JPG’s for the web: Either learn to live with the limitations of Lightroom.  Or export to Photoshop and save as JPG from there. The last option is in fact made rather easy, since it is possible to make an export-preset in Lightroom that will scale your photo to preselected dimensions, save it as uncompressed JPG and automatically open it in Photoshop – all at one click. I like to see this as turning Photoshop into a save-to-web plug-in for Lightroom

Then there is the issue of speed. I’ve tweaked the preview options a bit – and then I decided to replace my aging AMD CPU with a never duo-core version. That helped. The time Lightroom takes to generate larger previews are still noticeable – but not more than I can live with it.